Film, Theatre & Performance
Film as Religion, 2nd edition Myths, Morals, and Rituals John C. Lyden
November 2019 320pp 9781479811991 £22.99 / $28.00 PB 9781479802074 £77.00 / $89.00 HB NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
In Film as Religion, 2nd edition: Myths, Morals, and Rituals, John C. Lyden argues that popular films perform a religious function in our culture. The first edition of Film as Religion was one of the first texts to develop a framework for the analysis of the religious function of films for audiences. Like more formal religious institutions, films can provide us with ways to view the world and the values to confront it. Lyden argues that the cultural influence of films is analogous to that of religions, so that films can be understood as representing a “religious” worldview in their own right. Thoroughly updating his examples, Lyden examines a range of film genres and individual films, from The Godfather to The Hunger Games to Frozen, to show how film can function religiously. Excludes SE Asia & ANZ
Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham
Dances in Literature and Cinema Hannah Durkin
August 2019 280pp 9780252084454 £21.99 / $27.95 PB 9780252042621 £82.00 / $99.00 HB UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham were the two most acclaimed and commercially successful African American dancers of their era and among the first black women to enjoy international screen careers. However, difficulties in accessing and categorizing their works on the screen and on the page have obscured their contributions to film and literature. Hannah Durkin investigates Baker and Dunham’s films and writings to shed new light on their legacies as transatlantic artists and civil rights figures. Their trailblazing dancing and choreography reflected a belief that they could use film to confront racist assumptions while also imagining— within significant confines—new aesthetic possibilities for black women. Their writings, meanwhile, revealed their creative process, engagement with criticism, and the ways each mediated cultural constructions of black women's identities. Durkin offers an overdue appraisal of Baker and Dunham's places in cinematic and literary history. Excludes SE Asia, Indian sc & ANZ
Fall / Winter 2019
Todd Solondz
Julian Murphet
Contemporary Film Directors August 2019 200pp 9780252084591 £17.99 / $22.00 PB 9780252042768 £82.00 / $99.00 HB UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Films like Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness established Todd Solondz as independent cinema's premier satirist. Blending a trademark black humor into atmospheres of grueling bleakness, Solondz repeatedly takes moviegoers into a bland suburban junk space peopled by the damaged, the neglected, and the depraved. Julian Murphet appraises the career of the controversial, if increasingly ignored, indie film auteur. Through close readings and a discussion with the director, Murphet dissects how Solondz's themes and techniques serve stories laden with hot-button topics like pedophilia, rape, and family and systemic cruelty. Solondz's uncompromising return to the same motifs, stylistic choices, and characters reject any idea of aesthetic progression. Instead, he embraces an art of diminishing returns that satirizes the laws of valuation sustaining what we call cinema. It also reflects both Solondz's declining box office fortunes and the changing economics of independent film in an era of financial contraction. Excludes SE Asia, Indian sc & ANZ
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Where Histories Reside
India as Filmed Space Priya Jaikumar
September 2019 424pp 80 illus. 9781478004752 £26.99 / $30.95 PB 9781478004127 £101.00 / $114.95 HB DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
In Where Histories Reside Priya Jaikumar examines eight decades of films shot on location in India to show how attending to filmed space reveals alternative timelines and histories of cinema. In this bold “spatial” film historiography, Jaikumar outlines factors that shape India's filmed space, from state bureaucracies and commercial infrastructures to aesthetic styles and neoliberal policies. Whether discussing how educational shorts from Britain and India transform natural landscapes into instructional lessons or how Jean Renoir’s The River (1951) presents a universal human condition through the particularities of place, Jaikumar demonstrates that the history of filming a location has always been a history of competing assumptions, experiences, practices, and representational regimes. In so doing, she reveals that addressing the persistent question of “what is cinema?” must account for an aesthetics and politics of space.
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forthcoming
Fidel between the Lines
Paranoia and Ambivalence in Late Socialist Cuban Cinema Laura-Zoë Humphreys
October 2019 304pp 22 illus. 9781478006244 £24.99 / $27.95 PB 9781478005476 £92.00 / $104.95 HB DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Laura-Zoë Humphreys traces the changing dynamics of criticism and censorship in late-socialist Cuba through a focus on cinema. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, textual analysis, and archival research, Humphreys shows how Cuban filmmakers have historically turned to allegory to communicate an ambivalent relationship to the Revolution.
Lucrecia Martel Gerd Gemünden
Contemporary Film Directors October 2019 200pp 9780252084669 £17.99 / $22.00 PB 9780252042836 £82.00 / $99.00 HB UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Films like Zama have made Lucrecia Martel a fixture on festival marquees and critic's best lists. Her focus on the senses challenge film's usual emphasis on what a viewer sees. Gemünden offers a career-spanning analysis of a filmmaker dedicated to revealing the ephemeral, fortuitous, and endless variety of human experience.
National Pastimes
Cinema, Sports, and Nation Katharina Bonzel
Sports, Media, and Society January 2020 270pp 21 photos, index 9781496215529 £43.00 / $50.00 HB UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Sports have long fascinated filmmakers from Hollywood and beyond, from Bend It Like Beckham to Chariots of Fire to Rocky. Katharina Bonzel unravels the delicate matrix of national identity, sports, and emotion through the lens of popular sports films in comparative national contexts.
Excludes SE Asia, Indian sc & ANZ
Scenarios III
Stroszek; Nosferatu, Phantom of the Night; Where the Green Ants Dream; Cobra Verde Werner Herzog Translated by Krishna Winston
October 2019 216pp 4 b&w photos 9781517907815 £18.99 / $22.95 PB UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS
Continuing a series that Publishers Weekly pronounced “compulsively readable . . . equal parts challenging and satisfying, infuriating and enlightening,” Scenarios III presents, for the first time in English, the shapeshifting scripts for four of Werner Herzog’s early films. Excludes Japan & ANZ
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forthcoming
The American Midwest in Film and Literature
Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism Adam R. Ochonicky
December 2019 296pp 9780253045973 £25.99 / $32.00 PB 9780253045966 £77.00 / $90.00 HB INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Adam R. Ochonicky gives a critical overview of the Midwest's symbolic and often contradictory meanings in film and literature. Starting with the frontier writings of Frederick Jackson Turner, this book examines Midwestern film and literary texts stretching from the late-19th century through the beginning of the 21st century.
The Institutionalization of Educational Cinema North America and Europe in the 1910s and 1920s Edited by Marina Dahlquist & Joel Frykholm
January 2020 288pp 9780253045201 £33.00 / $38.00 PB 9780253045195 £77.00 / $90.00 HB INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
The Institutionalization of Educational Cinema studies the co-evolving discourses, cultural practices, technical standards, and institutional frameworks that transformed educational cinema from a convincing idea into an enduring genre.
Unsettled Scores
Politics, Hollywood, and the Film Music of Aaron Copland and Hanns Eisler Sally Bick
Music in American Life December 2019 256pp 9780252084645 £21.99 / $28.00 PB 9780252042812 £82.00 / $99.00 HB UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Bick's dual study of Copland and Eisler pairs interpretations of their writings on film composing with a close examination of their first Hollywood projects. Unsettled Scores illuminates the different ways these composers treated a film score as means of expressing their political ideas. Excludes SE Asia, Indian sc & ANZ
Theatre Antitheatricality and the Body Public Lisa A. Freeman
Haney Foundation Series November 2019 376pp 24 illus. 9780812224559 £24.99 / $29.95 NIP UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
In an exploration of antitheatrical incidents from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, Lisa A. Freeman demonstrates that at the heart of antitheatrical disputes lies a struggle over the character of the body politic that governs a nation and the bodies public that could be said to represent that nation.